The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life
By Clare Carlisle
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

“Marriage is rarely treated as a philosophical question,” writes scholar Clare Carlisle. The topic “has seemed too trivial a subject for deep thinking,” perhaps because concern with domestic relationships has long been associated with the feminine—and more recently with conservatism. But Carlisle argues that the study of marriage—both as a concept and in particular practice—can illuminate “great philosophical themes: desire, freedom, selfhood, change, morality, happiness, belief, [and] the mystery of other minds.”

In The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, Carlisle does not explore these abstractions. Instead, she interrogates how Victorian author George Eliot thought about marriage—how she constructed her own domestic alliances and also how she chose to write about the circumstances of marital relations in novels such as The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and Middlemarch. Although Carlisle’s training as a philosopher might give her insights into Eliot’s philosophical mind, what she constructs here is not philosophy but instead a thoughtful literary biography.

Eliot’s partnership with George Lewes was complicated from the beginning. Although the two authors were deeply committed to each other, they could not legally marry because Lewes was still wed to a woman now having children with his best friend. Still, Eliot insisted that her relationship with Lewes was “a sacred bond,” even if it was an extralegal one. She referred to their time of union as an elopement followed by a honeymoon. She called Lewes her husband and insisted that in social situations, she should be called Mrs. Lewes. Eliot even accepted the Victorian practice of husbands controlling their wives’ finances, despite the fact that the law did not apply to her situation.

Although their union was in many ways conventional, at its heart it was not just a domestic arrangement but a true “intellectual collaboration,” as Carlisle writes. Eliot and Lewes spent each morning writing alone in their separate studies. After lunch, they took walks together—talking through the philosophical and creative questions that had emerged in their independent morning work. In the evenings, the couple read aloud—everything from their own work to the philosophies of Hegel. They supported each other’s growth: Eliot encouraged Lewes in his empirical work, and Lewes was the first person to urge Eliot to try her hand at fiction. From the beginning, she believed their partnership was a “great experience” of a “double life, which helps me feel and think with double strength.”

Carlisle accepts Eliot’s claim that she and Lewes were so “closely woven” that theirs was a shared life. Still, she struggles to convey the intense interiority of their marriage. Eliot tried to keep the details of her married life—indeed all of her private life—sequestered. She was intent that “presentations of [her]self” be based only on the material she had chosen to publish. “My writings are public property,” she told a friend. “It is only myself…that I hold private.” Perhaps in an effort to thwart future biographers from divulging details of her personal life, she arranged for the letters she had written to Lewes, and the ones he had written to her, to accompany her to the grave.

The Marriage Question really sparkles when Carlisle uses these limited details about Eliot’s private life to inspire her own readings of Eliot’s novels where she tries to understand what might have been swirling in Eliot’s mind as she wrote. She argues that in the early novel Adam Bede, for example, Eliot was grappling with her feelings about becoming a widely-read novelist. The character Dinah Morris, a young Methodist preacher, violates convention and speaks in public with “a quiet depth of conviction” that moves her community. What matters to the biographer is the similarity of the emotional questions both women faced as they created their lives based on speaking publicly—that is, how both women used what Carlisle calls “the power of human voices to carry feeling across space and time,” be it in sermons presented in small rural towns or bestselling novels.

In her discussion of The Mill on the Floss, Carlisle considers how Eliot wrote about the conflict her character Maggie Tolliver feels when she “is forced to choose between keeping her brother’s love and fulfilling her grown-up needs in marriage.” When Eliot was writing drafts of the novel, her own brother ended their relationship because he believed her marital partnership was immoral. The Mill on the Floss certainly isn’t autofiction; the particulars of the character’s and the author’s circumstances—and the two resolutions—are utterly different. Still, Eliot portrayed Maggie considering the same big emotional question that occupied Eliot’s personal thoughts at the time.

Middlemarch reflects Eliot’s idea that marriage could increase partners’ understanding of themselves, of each other, and of the world at large. Contemporary readers might assume Eliot styled herself as a Dorothea marrying her own Causabon, believing it was her “duty to study anything that might help him the better in his great works” despite her husband’s fundamental lack of creativity. But when asked who served as her model for Dorothea’s stodgy pedant of a husband, Eliot gestured not to Lewes but to herself. Lewes, she claimed, was a model for Dorothea’s sister, the always-content and practically-minded Celia. Yet again, Eliot was raising in her fiction not particulars of her life but the broad questions that preoccupied her personally: in this case, how to make marriage become, as Carlisle says, “a site for philosophy.”

Carlisle’s approach of highlighting how themes in Eliot’s novels reflected Eliot’s own preoccupations allows readers to gain insight into the novels. More interestingly, it illustrates George Eliot’s approach to her work; we get to see how she functioned as a practicing author. The most significant contribution of The Marriage Question is its explication of this other kind of “double life”: the place where Eliot found a way to wed her private emotional life with her commitment to more universal questions. Through this marriage of individual experience and intellectual reasoning, Eliot created what Carlisle calls “a new genre for moral philosophy”—and wrote novels that are still among the best ever written.

Hannah Joyner lives in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson and From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.